Noah has instituted a certain level of internal quarantine between the females’ labs and his own, implemented by his Reach to ease the nagging worries of his Crown. The triggers he has left in the system alert him when the drones bring something big up out of Nod’s gravity well, far larger than any marsh-crawler or sun-drinking not-quite-plant. He has electronic eyes he can call on. What he sees . . . makes no sense. What he sees has a familiar shape, one he responds to at a very deep leveclass="underline" it is the shape of God; it is the shape of the past.
There are sufficient accoutrements of human occupation still in the orbital’s shell, and he registers that the females have found the thing containment. He registers that they are now working on a problem not of epidemiology but of communication.
It is not so long after this development that the three of them finally reap the disapproval of their peers.
There has been sporadic radio contact across the gulf between Nod and Damascus, not consciously governed, but the three scientists’ Reaches have sought data and sometimes processing power from the fragmentary city orbiting the water world. Someone has noticed and decided that their activities constitute an unacceptable risk. Forbidden is forbidden.
In fact there was considerable debate, as usual, and no one opinion prevailed, but one faction has worked themselves up into a righteous crusade. Now here they are, in a ship bristling with weapons and seething with fighter craft, determined to unilaterally bring an end to whatever abomination is being perpetrated out in Nod’s orbit.
Ruth and Abigail initiate communications and attempt to negotiate. On the screens of the warship a kaleidoscope of scientific rationale flashes, their hopes of reclaiming the planet, their progress, their preliminary findings, anything to stave off the hammer. Noah notes that they are obfuscating: no mention of their new-found experimental subject. They know that would be impossible to square with these crusaders. Noah himself continues working with his device, because it is his whim to do so even under threat of annihilation, and because he is afraid and frustrated and wants to strike back, and his Reach interprets that in a very specific way.
The females’ pleas and promises flash and coil within the warship, and they waver, they do waver. Certainty of cause or purpose has never been an octopus trait. A single clear voice can win over a mob or an army. But not this time.
The tide ebbs but then returns, stronger than ever, as the individual viewpoints within the warship mingle and turn to angry colours. The fighters detach from their mother ship. The weapons charge.
Abigail and Ruth have not been idle while their enemies debated. They are scientists after all, and they and Noah have, in their more paranoid moments, prepared for this. The hybrid station’s power plants are given over to fields that bend light, dissipating and diverting the lasers, foxing the missile tracking, confusing the fighters so that they attack each other or go spinning off into empty space seeking phantom targets. To the warship all this becomes instant proof that their suddenly potent enemy must be expunged. The Reaches that man the weapons decide that railgun pellets are the surest way and send a deadly salvo at the station, metal slugs accelerated to incredible speeds by electromagnetic pulses. The energy shielding of the station will deflect a few but not most. Despite the speeds involved, the distances in space are such that Ruth, Abigail and Noah are fully aware of what is coming. They have time to react, but no ability to save themselves.
Noah reacts. His Crown is seething with rage. He has an answer for the warship and, to the emotional hotbed that is an octopus mind, mutual destruction has a dramatic satisfaction to it that calm acceptance of death lacks. His arms lock about the interface of his invention, the beautiful doomed thing that will not, now, be the salvation of his people.
He triggers it. The result is instantaneous. Before its projectiles impact on the station, the warship and its closer fighters are gone. To Noah’s Crown they are simply obliterated, his enemies defeated in a wash of power he can only revel in. To his Reach, noting the instrument feedback and reports, they are still in existence, albeit smeared in a vanishingly thin cloud of atoms between here and a star system seven light years away, or so his calculations suggest.
A successful test of the equipment, is close to the sentiment that Noah dies with, and he is not unhappy at his personal achievement.
Then the projectiles tear through the station, sending lethal shockwaves through the water-filled spaces, venting ice and organic material.
And then? No more, not for many years until new, alien visitors come to disturb the unquiet tomb with their incautious tread.
PRESENT 4
THE FACE OF THE WATERS
1.
Paul is fiercely unhappy. Confinement is seldom a positive thing, but his species was never content to live in a cage even back when they were just semi-sentient molluscs and the pets of one Disra Senkovi. To keep an octopus was all too often a constant battle of the captor’s technology against the captive’s ingenuity. That love of freedom – the knowledge, perhaps, that if danger looms there is always a way out – runs deep in the species. As a captive, of his own kind no less, Paul cycles through feelings of despair, anger, misery, confusion and bitter betrayal – or at least emotions akin to such human feelings. His implants have limited access to the wider system and without the tactile company of his own kind his logical subconscious is starved of information and unable to contribute and express itself. He is left only with the whirl of his dominant id, making demands of the universe that the rest of his neural structure cannot fulfil.
And he fears. He does not quite know why he fears: he is living a nightmare where his impenetrable cell contains a horror he cannot see but feels the shadow of always. It is a horror his fellow cephalopods entirely share, which is why he is quarantine to this cell. The aliens – the humans in particular – are inextricably linked to the plague that stole their world from them. And, should anyone be inclined to forget, that world hangs below them, visible from any porthole and screen, writhing with remembrance.
The others have gone, now. He is left only with the unkind light, with few hiding places, with the aliens crouching in the next cell, all angles and muteness on the floor of their sterile, waterless chamber.
Paul had hidden himself from them at first, not wanting to attract their attention because of an instinctive aversion for making things worse. He understands by now that the aliens are as helpless as he is; moreover his courage is beginning to return as the spectre of infection recedes: he would know by now if he were sick with it.
And so he flicks himself into the truncated water column of his cell and gives the aliens a piece of his mind, squirming at the transparent barrier between their chambers, his skin flickering and glaring with angry colours that still contain an undercurrent of fear and bewilderment. Whilst back on his ship he had been a volunteer diplomat, filled with mercurial temerity; all that is forgotten now and he only knows that these ugly, static creatures are the source of his discomfort.
They watch him display – his colours, his skin drawn up into creases and jags, the threatening attitudes of his arms as the rest of his scattered brain does what it can to enforce his strangling desires. Then the human-looking one is holding up its device again, showing colours and shapes that are like slurred, mumbling speech. It signals peace, friendship, unhappiness, submission – that last as close to an apology as an octopus can really make. Paul is not swayed, only emboldened, finding a victim he can truly vent his spleen on without fear of repercussion. He has never been the strongest or most charismatic of his kind, and now these aliens will hear him out, for all the good it will do.